Dad was in the paper

‘Dad was in the paper,’ my sister said one day.

‘Really? What for?’ I was amazed. My dad has been retired for years, and dividing his time between following the news and practising calligraphy, neither of these things newsworthy in themselves.

‘Well, you know the number of newspapers we have at home. Besides those I bring home every night, he buys two other broadsheet papers. He makes clippings, photocopies them and distributes them to his fellow pensioners who gather downstairs every day to play poker or chess. According to the paper, he has been doing it for a long while, and all out of his own meagre pension.’

‘Had no one known about it at home?’

‘No, he’s kept it rather quiet and I only found out about it from the paper. Apparently someone in the neighbourhood provided the information.’

‘Ha,’ I was amused, ‘that is so typical of dad.’

A hardcore communist and loyal follower of Lei Feng, an army officer who devoted his whole life to the service of others, it was not enough for him to share his ‘fortune’ – access to an unusually large collection of newspapers – but to do it very discreetly. It is a rule he has adhered to all his life. In the late nineteen-eighties, he was the officer in charge of the allocation of company flats. For years his eldest daughter and her family had been struggling to find a place to live, and he was expected, and fully entitled, to keep for her the government-subsidised flat we were then living in. Yet without consulting his family, he surrendered it in order that ‘two newly-wedded couples in the company could solve their dire housing problem’. Putting communal needs first is his principle.

As children, we were made the dedicated volunteer cleaners of our apartment blocks, and on many of my home visits, I would find his lone figure sweeping the staircase.

‘The wall of the communal area is filthy and scratched. It looks bleak and uncared for. Why don’t you have it painted?’ I asked on one occasion. It was something he had helped to do not too many years ago.

‘It’s physically beyond me now,’ he replied. He is seventy-five.

‘But surely, you can have it painted professionally, and it shouldn’t cost much if every household contributed.’ Although not an affluent neighbourhood, the collective wealth is growing and I had seen private cars downstairs.

‘No, I can’t. If I did that, I would be regarded as a nuisance to those who did not want to contribute,’ my dad said, no doubt mindful of the waning influence of his idol Lei Feng.